As a child, she belonged to Vietnam’s ‘lonely generation.’ Today, she creates economic avenues for local producers.

Growing up in the Ha Tinh province in central Vietnam, Linh Dinh was part of the “lonely generation,” she says—a generation of children whose parents went abroad in search of more lucrative employment to better support their families. Dinh’s father left for work in Korea shortly after she was born, and her mother worked in a position in the government in Vietnam. Raised largely by (similarly busy) relatives, Dinh can vividly recall long, quiet days spent observing the world around her, namely the farm in view from her home.

She remembers watching the farmers, busy in their fields. And, as the years went by, she remembers seeing fewer and fewer farmers returning to those fields. Like her parents, many of the farmers near her also moved abroad, or simply joined newer industries, seeking better pay.

“They didn’t see the potential in the farm,” she says. “They saw people going abroad, earning a lot of money, and then sending that money back home. And then they saw the new houses and new cars” that money bought, she says.

But then, in 2013, the Vietnamese government started experimenting with a new economic model designed to bring those farmers back and reinvigorate the country’s once thriving agricultural export economy. The campaign, called “One Commune, One Product” or OCOP, is meant to focus the development of local specialities—small and medium producers whose products are high in quality even if they’re relatively smaller in quantity. The idea was fashioned after similar, successful initiatives in Japan and Thailand.

The program prioritized the exact qualities Dinh saw draining away when she was growing up: rural wisdom, local creativity, and specialized raw materials. It meant that a small coffee farmer in central Vietnam could actually compete on a bigger scale—and that the farmer’s family could live comfortably off the profits.

In 2018, the Vietnamese government implemented the OCOP program nationwide. And a few years after that, Dinh, who had already earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism in Vietnam, traveled to the U.S. to study at Northeastern University. She enrolled in the College of Professional Studies to work on a master’s degree in project management, and is set to graduate in 2025.

Dinh saw an opportunity even beyond her studies, though: Outside of the Asian continent, the U.S. is the biggest importer of goods from Vietnam.

“I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to go to the U.S., the biggest economy of the world, to learn how to stand on the shoulder of a giant,’” she says. Dinh was eager to learn, firsthand, what people in the U.S. wanted—and how to get it to them.

She created ATURE (a portmanteau of “Asian culture”) to bridge what she sees as a clear gap in the market: Producers in Vietnam have high-quality, culturally rich goods to sell, and consumers in the U.S. have a dearth of authentic Vietnamese goods to choose from. She sees her platform as an eventual link between the farmers and the consumers—a way to cut out expensive middlemen and elevate the artisans who are dependent upon the sale of their goods through compelling storytelling.

“The current problem is related to people working in farming or other small businesses within villages across small Asian communities, where there is no access to resources that could spread the awareness of their great products,” says Kristen Drobnis, a lecturer at Northeastern who is among Dinh’s mentors. “ATURE is trying to establish a network that will allow for small businesses to have an avenue to sell their products to people all over the world and not drive outrageous costs to the business owner. Also, ATURE is trying to increase economic growth in the small villages so these areas can thrive and help the residents grow financially—which will benefit everyone living in the village.”

Dinh was recognized among this year’s Northeastern University Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding. Dinh was honored among graduate student award winners.

Though her venture is still in the very earliest stages, Dinh already has her sights set on an audience in the U.S.: international students, in search of an authentic taste from home.

“When I’ve tried to make Vietnamese dishes here, I want to use the products from Vietnam,” she says, though those products can be difficult to come by. Oftentimes Dinh will resort to using Thai ingredients, which are more readily available at U.S. grocery stores, “to give me more of a taste of home.”

It’s that sense of home that drives Dinh to keep striving, keep creating. Ultimately, she hopes to build economic opportunities that enable families to make a living at home, without having to travel abroad for new horizons.

“I do everything based on my own childhood, and based on the love I have for the kids in Vietnam,” she says. “I don’t want any kid to grow up without parents, like I did.”